Welcome to Provisioning API

Why a Provisioning API by Commerce Layer and how to get started with it

Commerce Layer is a transactional commerce API for international brands. It lets you make any digital experience shoppable, anywhere.

In addition to the Core API, developers can leverage our own Provisioning API which exposes all the endpoints you need to exercise greater control over your organizational structure and user roles.

Most of those features are also available the codeless way from the UI of our Dashboard (built on top of our APIs):

Making direct calls to the Provisioning API allows you to manage provisioning tasks automatically instead of manually (eventually, even build your own custom Dashboard!).

This way, you can streamline user onboarding by creating accounts and permissions with simple API requests. You can also pull API credentials for Commerce Layer web apps, integrations, and sales channels directly from the API, making it possible to programmatically dole out API access for key integrations and/or sales channels whenever required. Thus many of the administrative tasks that go with proper user and application access can be automated, saving time and helping scale your business.

The guide that follows is your reference for all the operations that you can perform on the Provisioning API resources and contains all the information you need to get a comprehensive overview of how you can use it.

Let's get started!

Set out by checking the API specification and learning how to authenticate. Then go through the API reference at your leisure — there, for each single resource, you can find:

• A high-level explanation of the resource usage.

• The resource object and its fields, attributes, and relationships.

• The allowed CRUD operations you can perform on the related endpoint with basic examples of the request/response format.

Data model

Have a look at the related ER diagram and explore the flowchart that illustrates how most of the Provisioning API resources relate to each other.

Additional developer tools

JS SDK

To speed up your development process you can leverage the Provisioning SDK, a TypeScript library wrapper that makes it quick and easy to interact with Commerce Layer Provisioning API, both in browser and Node.js applications.

OpenAPI schema

The TypeScript SDK is built on top of the Provisioning OpenAPI schema, that you can use as well to to build mock servers, auto-generate code, SDKs for other languages, implement contract testing, and more.

CLI plugin

If you want to use the Provisioning API directly from the command line feel free to give the Provisioning plugin of Commerce Layer CLI a try!

LLM-friendly text files

Large Language Models are becoming increasingly important for information retrieval and knowledge assistance. To make Commerce Layer Provisioning API documentation content available in text-based formats that are easier for LLMs to process, ingest, and work with, you can leverage the following llms.txt files.

• Index — contains an index of all the page URLs and titles of the Provisioning API docs site, providing a comprehensive list of all available markdown-formatted pages:

https://docs.commercelayer.io/provisioning/llms.txt

• Full content — contains the full content of the Provisioning API docs site in one file that can be passed to LLMs as context:

https://docs.commercelayer.io/provisioning/llms-full.txt

Following a clear separation of concerns, each Commerce Layer API docs site has its own LLM files. The ones above index information about Provisioning API only. Check also: Core API, Metrics API, and Rules Engine.

MCP server

Model Context Protocol gives AI tools a structured way to discover and retrieve your docs as resources — no scraping required. To allow AI assistants to access Commerce Layer Provisioning API's documentation content directly, making it easy for tools like Claude Desktop, Cursor, and VS Code extensions to answer questions using the docs, we expose via HTTP an MCP server at the following URL:

https://docs.commercelayer.io/provisioning/~gitbook/mcp

Visiting the URL above in your browser will result in an error. Instead, you can share this with tools that can make HTTP requests, like LLMs or IDEs.

Following a clear separation of concerns, each Commerce Layer API has its own MCP server so that you can connect, activate, and deactivate them based on your needs. The one above is related to Provisioning API only. Check also: Core API, Metrics API, and Rules Engine.

More to read

If you're new to Commerce Layer you can sign up for free and try our Core commerce API while reading the documentation.

See the Metrics API Getting started guide and API reference to learn how to extract almost any kind of data information from your Commerce Layer's organization order history.

Check Commerce Layer's changelog to stay up-to-date with any changes, new features, and general improvements about the Provisioning API itself or any other Commerce Layer's app and open-source project.

For everything else, join us on Discord and feel free to ask any questions to the team or get involved in the conversation with the rest of our developers' community.